Modern Dance, Exiles, and Carmelita Maracci
With house renovations and baby preparations ongoing, my mind is awhirl—and having even greater difficulty concentrating than I’ve had throughout this already focus-less pregnancy (for me, “baby brain” apparently starts with conception). Originally, I planned to write a full review of an exhibition ending this weekend at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance 1900-1955, but that appears to be beyond my current capabilities. Deeply engrossing and incredibly well researched, Border Crossings “celebrates the fundamental contributions of artists of color and artists from immigrant or Indigenous communities to the history of modern dance… Through an examination of war, exile, inequality, and injustice.”
A large exhibition, it primarily uses photography to tell these histories (though there are some videos and artifacts). Every image is accompanied by the kind of in-depth captions that open up portals to a multitude of new research possibilities, leaving one dazed by the detail, depth and mind-opening excitement. Though I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about mid-century modern dance, I found myself writing down the names of dancers, artists, venues, companies, dances, and so on—eagerly awaiting the opportunity later to explore each in greater depth.
The exhibition’s introduction, as published in the accompanying brochure:
“Border Crossings challenges previous histories of modern dance to consider how war, inequality, and injustice shaped 20th century performance art. The exhibition demonstrates how exiled or marginalized artists catalyzed modern dance—its ethos, vision, and design—giving voice to crucial issues of geopolitical circumstance and structural racism. Crossing borders—physical, geographic, racial, artistic, spiritual—either by choice or by force became a historical circumstance out of people's control. These crossings are woven into the grammar of "the modern" in early 20th-century dance—they are its DNA.
Through movement and choreography, dance artists responded to local and global traumas of the first half of the 20th-century: Russian and Mexican Revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and, in the United States, legalized segregation and exclusionary immigrant quotas. Displacement and immigration produced psychic wounds for generations of artists—their modern dance vision became the visible embodiment of the era. These effects may be read at the level of form, but also political action. Dancers did not react passively to the traumas induced by war, injustice, and migration, but actively sought to affect change through dance-making.”
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